Lately I’ve been going on a lot of evenings to sit in Saint
Peter’s churchyard on 20th Street. It’s a nice old stone church with
a clock in its tower and a little jungle of a garden out behind the rectory.
One night while I was sitting there I saw a black and white cat steal in from
the street like a shadow. She glanced at me as she slid past and through the
wrought-iron fence into the garden. Once behind the bars she sat and watched me
sitting there on the steps.

Somebody puts two little bowls out for the churchyard cat
next to the rectory, one with food and one with water, and birds help
themselves from those bowls too. Since that first time of seeing the cat I
always hope I’ll see her again but I rarely do. She’s not the type who comes to
be petted and her quiet presence in the garden is always a very
mysterious one.

Sometimes I sit on the church steps and read until it’s
almost dark. In the evening when the sun sets over New Jersey, the church tower
turns a deep amber color and then it turns rosy and finally dark, and then the
old clock turns its light on.

I have been reading The
Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers in the churchyard. It took me
about forty or fifty pages before the story really hooked me but once it did,
it did. One night while I read on the steps, Alice (a minor character in the
book but a familiar one) suddenly died and I was shocked. It happened without any
warning and I had to go back and re-read the passage again to make sure it
really happened. Alice was the wife of the man who owned the New York Café in
the Southern town where a lot of the action was happening back in 1940, just as
real and vivid as anything going on at present in the churchyard. There was a
light on in the basement of the rectory and I could see a man sitting on a sofa
talking to someone. At that moment the man in the rectory basement seemed to be
part of the book.

Reading in the book about Mr. Singer, the mute who wears
beautifully clean white shirts and has his dinner in the New York Café every
night and spends so much of his time taking long walks all over town, I thought
of a few people I know who remind me of Mr. Singer. Especially one man who
lives somewhere in the neighborhood who I’ve seen around the streets for years.
He always wears a clean white shirt with a tie and a suit. He stands very tall,
and whenever I encounter him coming towards me, he’s always walking very fast
and forward bent as if into a gale. Sometimes I see him standing completely absorbed
before the big TV screen they put up at the entrance to the subway station a
few years ago, and sometimes I see him doing his laundry in the Laundromat. One day about a year ago I saw him standing in
front of a hamburger joint on 23rd street with a cup of coffee in
his hand and I decided it would be nice to speak to him. I didn’t want to bother
him, but I thought if I didn’t speak to him and then never saw him again, I
would regret it. So I asked him, “Does this place have good coffee?” He glanced
at me very quickly, very much the way the churchyard cat did, and said, “Yes.”

I think he lives in a kind of home for men who have something
a little wrong with them but who are not alcoholics or drug addicts, because I
usually see him in the vicinity of that house. I know two other men who live
there, one of whom I like very much. He’s a great big man with long dreadlocks who
sometimes comes to sit on the steps in front of my building and eat a bag of chips
from the bodega next door. The other one is a man who used to manage a Chinese
restaurant on the west side that I used to pass by, and where I got takeout
once in a while. He seemed to do nothing but work, from morning until night and
then one day a huge sign went up on the side of the building with the
restaurant in it that said, “Retail Space Available.” Not long after that I
heard the man on the street in front of the restaurant telling a lady that he
would have to earn a million dollars a year selling noodles to pay the new
rent. After the restaurant closed I started seeing him walking very sadly
around the neighborhood looking at the pavement.

The man with the clean white shirts never looks happy or
sad, but sometimes he looks a little like he’s been hypnotized. The other night
on the church steps I read about Mr. Singer’s walks. I read: “Often it happened now that he would be
spoken to and stopped during these walks. All kinds of people became acquainted
with him. If the person who spoke to him was a stranger, Singer presented his
card so that his silence would be understood.” Mr. Singer was a mute, but
there wasn’t anything wrong with him.

When it got too dark to read, I walked home looking into
people’s windows. A lot of them had cats in them, and when the lamps come on
you can see right into the rooms. There are some beautiful golden rooms between
my house and Saint Peter’s, just full of books from floor to ceiling. Sometimes
I wonder what would happen if I rang the bell outside one of those houses and
asked the person who answered if it would be all right for me to come in.

4 comments:

Reading 'The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter' in a churchyard somehow seems like a marriage made in heaven. It fits.

I also like to look in people's windows after sundown (in a nice way, I mean). It amazes me how beautiful some apartments are, and how well the old interiors have been kept up and not destroyed by modernization. It makes me feel like I'm living in an earlier, more gracious time before there was a bank on every corner that's not another Starbucks. Do you remember when people cared how they looked? There are still some, but especially when you leave the city, it's just depressing. We were at a baseball game the other week and a friend said, 'Did you ever see the photos of people at a baseball game in the 30s and 40s, even the 50s? The women all wore dresses and hats, and the men had jackets and ties. Now look at everyone here.'

Well, it was a more gracious time, for all the injustices and problems. The kind of time when you could see a woman reading a Carson McCullers book in a churchyard at sundown, perhaps, and not think it wonderfully unusual.

Yes, I remember. I remember when people dressed up to fly in an airplane. Tonight I looked into some very lovely windows on 10th Street on my way home and those little peeps made me feel very happy. Thank you for writing.

What beautiful writing, and what special memories you've brought up in my being. I now live on 10th Street, but for many years I lived right by the churchyard. Shortly after I moved to NYC, I started reading Carson McCullers and quickly devoured everything she wrote. Reading your piece brought me right back to Chelsea, Carson McCullers and a more innocent time, when there were no worries, and Life was simple.Thank you for sharing your lovely thoughts . . .